Infamy's Children

Yesterday's infamy has catapulted the United States into a new age, like the sudden death of a parent transports a teenager into reluctant adulthood. Our isolation is gone, our detachment from the harshest global realities now the stuff of childhood dreams. While our innocence may have been raped from us in the morning skies over Washngton and New York, our soul burns intact. Sadder, we are wiser. In grief, we strengthen in resolve. But we will never be the old America again.

No words can sum up the outrage, no speeches capture the single-minded grit the United States must show in pursuit of these criminals. We needn't palaver endlessly about it. We needn't give extensive air time to analysts, self-promoters, or so-called experts who want to make a career out of second-guessing madmen. We simply need the right people to collect the right people in a room, give them the resources they need, then cut them loose and wait.

The time for talk is over. It has to be. There is no common ground from which to communicate, no moral center to which we can speak. If it is justifiable in the terrorist lexicon to obliterate 5,000 civilian workers in an office high-rise, then those terrorists have no moral shelter, no ideology which can make demands on our conscience.

This is not the time for conciliation or temperance. We didn't call Hirohito on December 8, 1941 and offer to negotiate a brokered peace in Manchuria. We were suddenly and deliberately attacked in an act of cowardice and murder that rivals the worst Hitler ever did. You don't negotiate with a cancer.

Already groups are vying to leverage this trauma for political and economic gain. The intelligence community is prompting legislators for a bigger budget. Anti-Israeli forces are saying "I told you so." Hardened Europeans are claiming that the bombings were just the United States' share of a global terrorist experience, one they've met repeatedly in the past. Theirs was an elite club; the US was the untouched giant. Not any more. The blood of innocents has purchased us a place at that table. Siege Perilous, in fact.

Now that we're honorees at their hushed banquet, our "allies" are rushing to reassure us. Spain, France, Italy, and of course, England and Germany have all mouthed their official condemnations of the bombings. That's great. But talk is cheap. The true test will come when we ask for those countries to turn over information or witnesses, or to help in the manhunt. When the time came to bomb Moammar Khadafi, France wouldn't even let us use their airspace. The Saudis, always ambiguous allies at best, allowed Desert Storm to stage in their country, but only after strictly limiting our American-ness.

We have no use for such fair-weather friends now. Lip service is so much bugle lube. In time - soon, I hope - these condolers may be called on to stand and deliver. We'll see then if their friendship extends beyond a sound byte and a Hallmark card.

Within this country, we need to apply the same standard. Peace-mongers who would cry for this band of cutthroats are simply impediments to justice. That goes for the "go slow" crowd of appeasers in the media, the Congress, and the celebrity community. If you have nothing to contribute to the demise of the butchers, then keep your mouth shut. America is no longer in a mood to listen to what's wrong with America. Tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism, all that treacly glaze of compassion and brotherhood, vanished behind the rain of bodies and debris that fell in Manhattan yesterday.

Nothing - nothing - we have ever done qualifies us for this despicable act. Whatever imagined hegemony stirs the hatred of Islamic fundamentalists, the United States has never been such a bad neighbor as to deserve this calculated mayhem. In the barbaric reaches of the scrub deserts, such behavior may be commonplace, but in a civilized world, it is not only offensive, it strikes at our very notions of humanity. No one has the right to take that from us for any offense, let alone because of the hyperbole that passes for fact among purblind zealots.

Bring me the head of Osama Bin Laden. Sieze his assets. Harass his subordinates. Extort information from his doorman and the boy who shines his sandals. Send a clear message to him and his Bedouins of bedlam that they will have no home, no haven, no harbor, and that they contaminate and endanger every corner they sleep in. Let them savor the terror of exhausted animals when the hounds are closing in and there's nowhere left to hide. Pursue them to the ends of creation, then strike them down like rodents. Let them live with the knowledge that not only do they die, but their vicious, murderous hatred dies with them.

Bring me the head of Osama Bin Laden. Then eradicate his hell-spawned disciples, his ideological brethren, his accomplices, his sympathizers, and the guy who delivers pizza to whatever rock he's hiding under. Burn his huts, disperse the ashes and salt the earth. Then pave the barren waste and put a sewage plant on it. Let it be forever a memorial to an idea that never should have existed in a human head.

They shut us down, but they can't hold us down. Glass and steel are fragile things before depravity of this dimension. Not so the fighting spirit of America. Forged in fire, it strengthens under adversity, and finds its true calling when the hour seems bleakest. When the tumult and the shouting dies, an adamantine resolve remains, and the heart of this great nation beats forever on. It is notable that one of the first acts of the rescue crews on this, the Day After, was to affix our flag to a skewed but visible pole that jutted from the rubble. That flag has seen terror before, has seen cowards before, has seen enemies of every stripe and ilk. Yet amid devastation unparalleled in a peacetime world, still it flies, still it flutters, still it holds our hearts and fires our spirit.

This act of vilest treachery bespeaks an even greater evil than Pearl Harbor, and stirs the slumbering giant once more. Let us lend our voices to the outrage, and our backs to the ugly task before us. We don't need political posturing or expeditious alliances, any more than a grieving widow needs someone trying to sell her aluminum siding. The nation must mourn and bury its dead. Then it must arise in silent rage, and begin the grim odyssey of retribution.

The true test will come when we ask for those countries to turn over information or witnesses, or to help in the manhunt.

Exactly, IJ.

We should also pressure those journalists that so easily 'find' these terrorists for their 'interviews'.

Yesterday, the terrorists responsible for the attacks on the USA started World War III. They showed that they have the capability to strike us and more importantly that they have the will to do it.

We certainly have the military capability to defeat them, but now we must demonstrate the political will to do so.

Our allies must also show the will to join us in this fight to destroy the terrorists. If not, we must go it alone, but it must be done.

President Bush's declaration that we will not differentiate between the terrorists themselves and the nations who harbor them is the correct approach. We know who these terrorists are. We know which countries have aided them. It's time to win the war.

Well said:

Palestinians flash the V-sign and wave Palestinian and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) flags during a demonstration at the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp near the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon, Tuesday Sept. 11, 2001. Palestinians in Lebanon's refugee camps celebrated the attacks in the United States by firing in the air using all kinds of weapons. (AP Photo/Mohamed Zatari)

People who endorsed this are guilty and should be punished along with all the other enablers.

These ghouls can be easily dispatched by clandestine hit teams who infiltrate these rat nests, abduct the offenders in the middle of the night, and apply an ice pick at the base of the skull.

You poke at the big dog day after day, then one day you notice that the big dog's cage door is open ...

You're absolutely right. These people are as much or more our enemies than the so-called masterminds.

You wrote "...If you have nothing to contribute to the demise of the butchers, then keep your mouth shut. America is no longer in a mood to listen to what's wrong with America...."

If you want me to keep my mouth shut then you shouldn't be such a good writer.

What "America" are you referring to sir? The America who armed, trained and supported THESE VERY SAME BUTCHERS when it suited OUR real-politik objectives? The same America who complacently went about its business as their government bombed the civilian infrastructure and killed civilians in a country locked in a deadly civil war against THE SAME MUJAHADEEN we are now going to, justly, war upon?

No sir. I am too much of an American woman, I suppose. I am backed up by the spirits of men who fought in The Grand Army of the Republic and tough pioneer women who chopped wood and dropped babies on the plains--and I will NOT shut up.

Strong intelligent women long for REAL men to step up to the plate to defend our civilization at a time like this. And REAL men are NOT afraid of gazing long and hard and rationally at the roots of this disaster--even as they raise their arms to kill the enemy who perptrated this act of war against us.

Yes, that would be the America to which I refer. The one that occasionally picks its friends unwisely, arms them, trains them, stands behind them, and then gets stabbed in the back when they are no longer useful. The same America that was betrayed by the mujahadeen, by Ho Chi Minh, by its allies in Europe that have turned into its harshest critics. Yes, that America.

But not the America that deserves to have its citizens pulverized in the rubble of someone else's nightmare. There is no such place.

I repeat, if you have nothing to contribute to eradicating these vermin, keep your mouth shut. I for one am not interested.

IJ, I would hope that at the very least, Mossad has been collecting the pictures of these open rejoicers over the hideous obscenity perpetrated on September 11, 2001. I trust some here at FR have been compiling the pictures. We will have a use for them in the future, if for no other purpose than to remind 'the powers that be' that we have long memories for the hatred these pathetic ghouls display.

An Arab friend (a Christian from Lebanon, BTW) expressed the thanks giving that he lives here as an American, for his disgust is overwhelming to his soul when he sees these ghoulish rejoicers and the children they have so thoroughly diseases with their hatred. As his friend, I seek to offer any protection for him and his family that I may. He or even Islamic Americans are not the problem we face. Hate, pure, raw, undisguised hate, that supports and encourages such terrorists acts, there is the source of our enemy. We must be ready to annihilate that when uncovered, while at the same time retaining our American spirit which supports our fellow Americans, regardless of race or religious beliefs, if those beliefs abide in peace and mutual respect.

I too have at least one friend who is Lebanese. He is as appalled at this horror as anyone I've met. And just around the corner from where I work, there is an Afghani restaurant that I've frequented for lunches over the past years. It's hard for me to eat kabob after this week's events, but I remind myself that the owner is not in the Taliban.

While truth may be the first casualty of war, often friendships are the second. We must guard against that happening, but if it does, it is simply another cost in this ugly business.

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